Quarry park site:

A lot of people gathered on this one bridge jutting out over by the waterfall, and they’re all looking at their phones.

One (Asian[-American?]) guy who’s by himself and right by me as I walk on the pathway has his phone mounted to his bike and is using it on there, and I ask him if this is Pokemon Go.

He says that it is and that someone put a Lure out, and then I ask him if I could see the game because I haven’t actually seen it yet, and he shows me for quite a while, all the different things you can do.

Odd ice cream truck music.

As I’m sitting in my house working on my dissertation, I hear ice cream truck music, and the ice cream truck is playing the theme from “Love Story”.

Which, I thought, is a very odd selection, if the purpose of it is to make you want to go run out of your house and go get some ice cream.

Then, as I listen, the next song is “You are My Sunshine”, and so I start thinking about the sickness scenes in “Beaches”, and again I’m thinking of how this is the worst ice cream truck music ever, so I glance out the window to see what the heck truck this is as I hear the music getting closer.

Then, a (Mexican) paleta vendor bicycles by on the sidewalk that I can see out of my side window from my kitchen table, and the music is coming out of a boombox sitting on top of the cooler at the front of his bike.

He’s there and then he’s gone, and I wonder where he got the ice cream music recording.

Neighborly greeting.

The other day I was strolling through the neighborhood and was going up the street down near me if you turn right right outside my house and then turn left after that.

As I was strolling, I was looking at what people were doing with their yards, and I saw one small frontyard all strung out with vegetables, and as I was looking at that, I noticed a very shrunken (old) (Chinese) woman with a skull-like face just leaning with her thin arms against the metal railing out on the front porch of the house, just standing there and looking out on the garden.

“Hi,” she said as she saw me, softly, and impressing me because she took the initial gesture of friendliness.

“Nice garden,” I said, but she didn’t understand me, which made her saying hi to me first even more impressive.

Then, I walked on.

Wart update.

My wart on the inside of my lefthand pinkie finger has shrunk a lot from my putting that solution on it and peeling off skin as I’m able, and it’s just a mild bump now.

It’s hard to even see, but you can still feel there’s something there if you roll it between your fingers, because there’s a toughness in the skin where there shouldn’t be, since it should feel like just normal skin there when you roll it between your fingers.

An exchange at the (black) neighborhood bar:

Middle-aged (black) DJ, to (middle-aged) (black) bartender in bright white clothing and with bleached hair and big gold hoop earrings: “So what’s special, besides [bartender’s first name]?”

Bartender: “Oh honey, you stop.”

Middle-aged (black) DJ (winking): “Never.”

Saw an undergrad activist student.

The other Sunday I bumped into a student who I had in my writing class a few years ago, and who really got into undergraduate activism, and who is always doing a sit-in somewhere or a protest at a major city landmark, including shutting places of business down for economic protests.

“Hey, how are you doing?”, I was like.  “Chain yourself to anything lately?”.

Since she understands my sense of humor, she just laughed.

“It’s okay if you haven’t, summers are a time to take it easy,” I was like.

Then, I had a thought and was like, “You know, next time you go chain yourself to some stuff, before you go and do that, you should liaise with the undergraduate sadomasochism club, I bet they’d love to join you.”

(There actually is an undergraduate sadomasochism club, and my one activist student is always coalition-building.)

Later, I thought that if you actually went and tried to do that, you could always tell the kids that you wouldn’t only chain them, but you could gag them, too, if they wanted.

You could also tell them that risking getting kicked out of school was being “naughty”, and you could say the word “naughty” a lot, to make them blush and get nervous at just the thought of it.

I find the whole idea very satisfying, of calling up the sadomasochists to be frontline hardcore activists who chain themselves to shit.

Grapes got moldy.

So, I had some grapes in the fridge, and they got moldy.

They had been there like a week and I had eaten half, but then I kind of forgot about them.

Next time I thought of them, there was a few with bits of mold on them, little white encrustations forming here and there towards where the stem was going into the fruit,

Then, like a week after that, I look at the grapes again, and there’s a big chunk of mold growing toward the heart of the bunch, outward from the thick stalks at the center.

I felt guilty, and so I took it out and picked out a few salvageable grapes and ate them.

Occasionally, one tasted a bit like mold, though you couldn’t see any on it.